Since Apple ditched headphone jacks on iPhones and introduced AirPods, the whole industry replicated it and gave birth to a new TWS market. In the past few years, the market has exploded with new audio brands and even smartphone manufacturers are battling to get a slice of the TWS market share.
Well, since last year, when the pandemic forced us to work from home, the demand for these TWS earbuds have increased even more. As these are electronic devices, these earbuds tend to get damaged after few years, so the market’s demand will likely go upwards rather than declining.
Meanwhile, Digitimes Research has posted a new report that states the global shipments of TWS (true wireless stereo) headsets is likely to grow 40.5% on year to 259 million units in 2021. Also, the company that started this trend, Apple, will remain the top vendor for TWS headsets this year, accounting for over 40% of the market share.
Digitimes also says that Apple might not grow as predicted if more rival vendors introduce models with comparable hardware and software specifications and higher price/performance ratios. As we already have seen in India, budget TWS earbuds are booming thanks to brands like boAt, pTron, JBL, Realme and Xiaomi; Apple here has a lot less market share.
Obviously, this year, brands could focus more on improving the sound experience of earbuds to compete against Apple, bring features like  360-degree surround sound and work on sound quality control, sensor utilization and algorithm integration.
The application of Bluetooth LE (low energy) Audio and LC3 (low complexity communications codec) technologies could significantly improve power consumption and sound quality, especially for entry-level TWS models. So, in 2021, though the shipments of TWS earbuds will be rising at an exponential rate in terms of quality and variety, we are yet to experience more.
Buy Apple AirPods: https://amzn.to/3y5tbH5
